The Queen's Gambit

Middle Game in Chess, translated from the Russian of D. Luchenko.
***
The school knew about her, well enough, by the next tournament, and this
time she hadn’t claimed illness as an excuse. Mrs. Wheatley talked to the
principal, and Beth was excused from her classes. Nothing was said about
the illnesses she had lied about. They wrote her up in the school paper, and
people pointed her out in the hallways. The tournament was in Kansas City,
and after she won it the director took her and Mrs. Wheatley to a steakhouse
for dinner and told her they were honored to have her participate. He was a
serious young man, and he treated both of them politely.
“I’d like to play in the U.S. Open,” Beth said over dessert and coffee.
“Sure,” he said. “You might win it.”
“Would that lead to playing abroad?” Mrs. Wheatley asked. “In Europe, I
mean?”
“No reason why not,” the young man said. His name was Nobile. He
wore thick glasses and kept drinking ice water. “They have to know about
you before they invite you.”
“Would winning the Open make them know about me?”
“Sure. Benny Watts plays in Europe all the time, now that he’s got his
international title.”
“How’s the prize money?” Mrs. Wheatley asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Pretty good, I think.”
“What about Russia?” Beth said.
Nobile stared at her a minute, as though she had suggested something
illicit. “Russia’s murder,” he said finally. “They eat Americans for breakfast
over there.”
“Now, really…” Mrs. Wheatley said.
“They really do,” Nobile said. “I don’t think there’s been an American
with a prayer against the Russians for twenty years. It’s like ballet. They
pay people to play chess.”
Beth thought of those pictures in Chess Review, of the men with grim
faces, bending over chessboards—Borgov and Tal, Laev and Shapkin,

---

scowling, wearing dark suits. Chess in Russia was a different thing than
chess in America. Finally she asked, “How do I get in the U.S. Open?”
“Just send in an entry fee,” Nobile said. “It’s like any other tournament,
except the competition’s stiffer.”
***
She sent in her entry fee, but she did not play in the U.S. Open that year.
Mrs. Wheatley developed a virus that kept her in bed for two weeks, and
Beth, who had just passed her fifteenth birthday, was unwilling to go alone.
She did her best to hide it, but she was furious at Alma Wheatley for being
sick, and at herself for being afraid to make the trip to Los Angeles. The
Open was not as important as the U.S. Championship, but it was time she
started playing in something other than events chosen solely on the basis of
the prize money. There was a tight little world of tournaments like the
United States Championship and the Merriwether Invitational that she knew
of through overheard conversations and from articles in Chess Review; it
was time she got into it, and then into international chess. Sometimes she
would visualize herself as what she wanted to become; a truly professional
woman and the finest chessplayer in the world, traveling confidently by
herself in the first-class cabins of airplanes, tall, perfectly dressed, good-
looking and poised—a kind of white Jolene. She often told herself that she
would send Jolene a card or a letter, but she never did. Instead she would
study herself in the bathroom mirror, looking for signs of that poised and
beautiful woman she wanted to become.
At sixteen she had grown taller and better-looking, had learned to have
her hair cut in a way that showed her eyes to some advantage, but she still
looked like a schoolgirl. She played tournaments about every six weeks
now—in states like Illinois and Tennessee, and sometimes in New York.
They still chose ones that would pay enough to show a profit after the
expenses for the two of them. Her bank account grew, and that was a
considerable pleasure, but somehow her career seemed to be on a plateau.
And she was too old to be called a prodigy anymore.

---

SIX
Although the U.S. Open was being held in Las Vegas, the other people at
the Mariposa Hotel seemed oblivious to it. In the main room the players at
the craps tables, at roulette and at the blackjack tables wore brightly colored
double-knits and shirts; they went about their business in silence. On the
other side of the casino was the hotel coffee shop. The day before the
tournament Beth walked down an aisle between crapshooters where the
main sound was the tapping of clay chips and of dice on felt. In the coffee
shop she slid onto a stool at the counter, turned around to look at the mostly
empty booths and saw a handsome young man sitting hunched over a cup of
coffee, alone. It was Townes, from Lexington.
She stood up and went over to the booth. “Hello,” she said.
He looked up and blinked, not recognizing her at first. Then he said,
“Harmon! For Christ’s sake!”
“Can I sit down?”
“Sure,” he said. “I should have known you. You were on the list.”
“The list?”
“The tournament list. I’m not playing. Chess Review sent me to write it
up.” He looked at her. “I could write you up. For the Herald-Leader.”
“Lexington?”
“You got it. You’ve grown a lot, Harmon. I saw the piece in Life.” He
looked at her closely. “You’ve even gotten good-looking.”
She felt flustered and did not know what to say. Everything about Las
Vegas was strange. On the table in each booth was a lamp with a glass base
filled with purple liquid that bubbled and swirled below its bright pink
shade. The waitress who handed her a menu was dressed in a black
miniskirt and fishnet hose, but she had the face of a geometry teacher.
Townes was handsome, smiling, dressed in a dark sweater with a striped
shirt open at the throat. She chose the Mariposa Special: hot cakes,
scrambled eggs and chili peppers with the Bottomless Cup of coffee.

---

“I could do half a page on you for the Sunday paper,” Townes was
saying.
The hot cakes and eggs came, and Beth ate them and drank two cups of
coffee.
“I’ve got a camera in my room,” Townes said. He hesitated. “I’ve got
chessboards, too. Do you want to play?”
She shrugged. “Okay. Let’s go up.”
“Terrific!” His smile was dazzling.
The drapes were open, with a view of a parking lot. The bed was huge
and unmade. It seemed to fill the room. There were three chessboards set
up: one on a table by the window, one on the bureau, and the third in the
bathroom next to the basin. He posed her by the window and shot a roll of
film while she sat at the board and moved the pieces. It was difficult not to
look at him as he walked around. When he came close to her and held a
little light meter near her face, she found herself catching her breath at the
sensation of warmth from his body. Her heart was beating fast, and when
she reached out to move a rook she saw that her fingers were trembling.
He clicked off the last shot and began rewinding the film. “One of those
should do it,” he said. He set the camera on the nightstand by the bed.
“Let’s play chess.”
She looked at him. “I don’t know what your first name is.”
“Everyone calls me Townes,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I call you
Harmon. Instead of Elizabeth.”
She began setting up the pieces on the board. “It’s Beth.”
“I’d rather call you Harmon.”
“Let’s play skittles,” she said. “You can play White.”
Skittles was speed chess, and there wasn’t time for much complexity. He
got his chess clock from the bureau and set it to give them each five
minutes. “I should give you three,” he said.
“Go ahead,” Beth said, not looking at him. She wished he would just
come over and touch her—on the arm maybe, or put his hand on her cheek.
He seemed terribly sophisticated, and his smile was easy. He couldn’t be
thinking about her the way she was thinking about him. But Jolene had said,
“They all think about it, honey. That’s just what they think about.” And they
were alone in his room, with the king-sized bed. In Las Vegas.

---

When he set the clock at the side of the board, she saw they both had the
same amount of time. She did not want to play this game with him. She
wanted to make love with him. She punched the button on her side, and his
clock started ticking. He moved pawn to king four and pushed his button.
She held her breath for a moment and began to play chess.
***
When Beth came back to their room Mrs. Wheatley was sitting in bed,
smoking a cigarette and looking mournful. “Where’ve you been, honey?”
she said. Her voice was quiet and had some of the strain it had when she
spoke of Mr. Wheatley.
“Playing chess,” Beth said. “Practicing.”
There was a copy of Chess Review on the television set. Beth got it and
opened it to the masthead page. His name wasn’t among the editors, but
down below, under “Correspondents,” were three names; the third was D.
L. Townes. She still didn’t know his first name.
After a moment Mrs. Wheatley said, “Would you hand me a can of beer?
On the dresser.”
Beth stood up. Five cans of Pabst were on one of the brown trays room
service used, and a half-eaten bag of potato chips. “Why don’t you have one
yourself?” Mrs. Wheatley said.
Beth picked up two cans; they felt metallic and cold. “Okay.” She handed
them to Mrs. Wheatley and got herself a clean glass from the bathroom.
When Beth gave her the glass, Mrs. Wheatley said, “I guess you’ve never
had a beer before.”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Well…” Mrs. Wheatley frowned. She lifted the tab with a little pop and
poured expertly into Beth’s glass until the white collar stood above the rim.
“Here,” she said, as though offering medicine.
Beth sipped the beer. She had never had it before but it tasted much as
she had expected, as though she had always known what beer would taste
like. She tried not to make a face and finished almost half the glass. Mrs.
Wheatley reached out from the bed and poured the rest of it in. Beth drank
another mouthful. It stung her throat slightly, but then she felt a sensation of
warmth in her stomach. Her face was flushed—as though she were

---

blushing. She finished off the glassful. “Goodness,” Mrs. Wheatley said,
“you shouldn’t drink so fast.”
“I’d like another,” Beth said. She was thinking of Townes, how he had
looked after they finished playing and she stood up to leave. He had smiled
and taken her hand. Just holding his hand for that short time made her
cheeks feel the way the beer had. She had won seven fast games from him.
She held her glass tightly and for a moment wanted to throw it on the floor
as hard as she could and watch it shatter. Instead she walked over, picked up
another can of beer, put her finger in the ring and opened it.
“You really shouldn’t…” Mrs. Wheatley said. Beth filled her glass.
“Well,” Mrs. Wheatley said, resigned, “if you’re going to do that, let me
have one too. I just don’t want you to be sick…”
Beth banged her shoulder against the door frame going into the bathroom
and barely got to the toilet in time. It stung her nose horribly as she threw
up. After she finished, she stood by the toilet for a while and began to cry.
Yet, even while she was crying, she knew that she had made a discovery
with the three cans of beer, a discovery as important as the one she had
made when she was eight years old and saved up her green pills and then
took them all at one time. With the pills there was a long wait before the
swooning came into her stomach and loosened the tightness. The beer gave
her the same feeling with almost no wait.
“No more beer, honey,” Mrs. Wheatley said when Beth came back into
the bedroom. “Not until you’re eighteen.”
***
The ballroom was set up for seventy chess players, and Beth’s first game
was at Board Nine, against a small man from Oklahoma. She beat him as if
in a dream, in two dozen moves. That afternoon, at Board Four, she crushed
the defenses of a serious young man from New York, playing the King’s
Gambit and sacrificing the bishop the way Paul Morphy had done.
Benny Watts was in his twenties, but he looked nearly as young as Beth.
He was not much taller, either. Beth saw him from time to time during the
tournament. He started at Board One and stayed there; people said he was
the best American player since Morphy. Beth stood near him once at the
Coke machine, but they did not speak. He was talking to another male

---

player and smiling a lot; they were amiably debating the virtues of the
Semi-Slav defense. Beth had made a study of the Semi-Slav a few days
before, and she had a good deal to say about it, but she remained silent, got
her Coke and walked away. Listening to the two of them, she had felt
something unpleasant and familiar: the sense that chess was a thing between
men, and she was an outsider. She hated the feeling.
Watts was wearing a white shirt open at the collar, with the sleeves rolled
up. His face was both cheerful and sly. With his flat straw-colored hair he
looked as American as Huckleberry Finn, yet there was something
untrustworthy about his eyes. He, too, had been a child prodigy and that,
besides the fact that he was Champion, made Beth uneasy. She remembered
a Watts game book with a draw against Borstmann and a caption reading
“Copenhagen: 1948.” That meant Benny had been eight years old—the age
Beth was when she was playing Mr. Shaibel in the basement. In the middle
of that book was a photograph of him at thirteen, standing solemnly at a
long table facing a group of uniformed midshipmen seated at chessboards;
he had played against the twenty-three-man team at Annapolis without
losing a game.
When she came back with her empty Coke bottle, he was still standing
by the machine. He looked at her. “Hey,” he said pleasantly, “you’re Beth
Harmon.”
She put the bottle in the case. “Yes.”
“I saw the piece in Life,” he said. “The game they printed was a pretty
one.” It was the game she’d won against Beltik.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I’m Benny Watts.”
“I know.”
“You shouldn’t have castled, though,” he said smiling.
She stared at him. “I needed to get the rook out.”
“You could have lost your king pawn.”
She wasn’t sure what he was talking about. She remembered the game
well and had gone over it in her head a few times but found nothing wrong
with it. Was it possible he had memorized the moves from Life and found a
weakness? Or was he just showing off? Standing there, she pictured the
position after the castle; the king pawn looked all right to her.
“I don’t think so.”

---

“He plays bishop to B-5, and you’ve got to break the pin.”
“Wait a minute,” she said.
“I can’t,” Benny said. “I’ve got to play an adjournment. Set it up and
think it out. Your problem is his queen knight.”
Suddenly she was angry. “I don’t have to set it up to think it out.”
“Goodness!” he said and left.
When he was gone, she stood by the Coke machine for several minutes
going over the game, and then she saw it. There was an empty tournament
board on a table near her; she set up the position before castling against
Beltik, just to be certain, but she felt a knot in her stomach doing it. Beltik
could have made the pin, and then his queen knight became a threat. She
had to break the pin and then protect against a fork with that damned
knight, and after that he had a rook threat and, bingo, there went her pawn.
It could have been crucial. But what was worse, she hadn’t seen it. And
Benny Watts, just reading Life magazine, reading about a player he knew
nothing about, had picked it up. She was standing at the board; she bit her
lip, reached down and toppled the king. She had been so proud of finding
an error in a Morphy game when she was in seventh grade. Now she’d had
something like that done to her, and she did not like it. Not at all.
She was sitting behind the white pieces at Board One when Watts came
in. When he shook her hand, he said in a low voice, “Knight to knight five.
Right?”
“Yes,” she said, between her teeth. A flash bulb popped. Beth pushed her
queen’s pawn to queen four.
She played the Queen’s Gambit against him and by midgame felt with
dismay that it had been a mistake. The Queen’s Gambit could lead to
complicated positions, and this one was Byzantine. There were half a dozen
threats on each side, and the thing that made her nervous, that made her
reach out for a piece several times and then stop her hand before touching it
and draw back, was that she didn’t trust herself. She did not trust herself to
see everything Benny Watts could see. He played with a calm, pleasant
precision, picking up his pieces lightly and setting them down noiselessly,
sometimes smiling to himself as he did so. Every move he made looked
solid as a rock. Beth’s great strength was in fast attack, and she could find
no way to attack. By the sixteenth move she was furious with herself for
playing the gambit in the first place.

---

There must have been forty people clustered around the especially large
wooden table. There was a brown velvet curtain behind them with the
names 
HARMON
and 
WATTS
pinned to it. The horrible feeling, at the bottom
of the anger and fear, was that she was the weaker player—that Benny
Watts knew more about chess than she did and could play it better. It was a
new feeling for her, and it seemed to bind and restrict her as she had not
been bound and restricted since the last time she sat in Mrs. Deardorff’s
office. For a moment she looked over the crowd around the table, trying to
find Mrs. Wheatley, but she was not there. Beth turned back to the board
and looked briefly at Benny. He smiled at her serenely, as though he were
offering her a drink rather than a head-splitting chess position. Beth set her
elbows on the table, leaned her cheeks against her clenched fists and began
to concentrate.
After a moment a simple thought came to her: I’m not playing Benny
Watts; I’m playing chess. She looked at him again. His eyes were studying
the board now. He can’t move until I do. He can only move one piece at a
time. She looked back to the board and began to consider the effects of
trading, to picture where the pawns would be if the pieces that clogged the
center were exchanged. If she took his king knight with her bishop and he
retook with the queen pawn… No good. She could advance the knight and
force a trade. That was better. She blinked and began to relax, forming and
reforming the relationships of pawns in her mind, searching for a way of
forcing an advantage. There was nothing in front of her now but the sixty-
four squares and the shifting architecture of pawns—a jagged skyline of
imaginary pawns, black and white, that flowed and shifted as she tried
variation after variation, branch after branch of the game tree that grew
from each set of moves. One branch began to look better than the others.
She followed it for several half-moves to the possibilities that grew from it,
holding in her mind the whole set of imaginary positions until she found
one that had what she wanted to find.
She sighed and sat upright. When she pulled her face away from her fists,
her cheeks were sore and her shoulders stiff. She looked at her clock. Forty
minutes had passed. Watts was yawning. She reached out and made the
move, advancing a knight in a way that would force the first trade. It looked
innocuous enough. Then she punched the clock.

---

Watts studied the board for half a minute and started the trade. For a
moment she felt panic in her stomach: Could he see what she was planning?
That quickly? She tried to shake off the idea and took the offered piece. He
took another, just as she had planned. She took. Watts reached out to take
again, but hesitated. Do it! she commanded silently. But he pulled his hand
back. If he saw through what she was planning, there was still time to get
out of it. She bit her lip. He was studying the board intently. He would see
it. The ticking of the clock seemed very loud. Beth’s heart was beating so
strongly that for a moment she feared Watts would hear it and know she
was panicked and—
But he didn’t. He took the trade just as she had planned it. She looked at
his face almost in disbelief. It was too late for him now. He pressed the
button that stopped his clock and started hers.
She pushed the pawn up to rook five. Immediately he stiffened in his
chair—almost imperceptibly, but Beth saw it. He began studying the
position intently. But he must have seen he was going to be stuck with
doubled pawns; after two or three minutes he shrugged and made the
necessary move, and Beth did her continuation, and then on the next move
the pawn was doubled and the nervousness and anger had left her. She was
out to win now. She would hammer at his weakness. She loved it. She loved
attack.
Benny looked at her impassively for a moment. Then he reached out his
hand, picked up his queen, and did something astonishing. He quietly
captured her center pawn. Her protected pawn. The pawn that had been
holding the queen to her corner for most of the game. He was sacrificing his
queen. She could not believe it.
And then she saw what it meant, and her stomach twisted sharply. How
had she missed it? With the pawn gone, she was open to a rook-bishop mate
because of the bishop on the opened diagonal. She could protect by
retreating her knight and moving one of her rooks over, but the protection
wouldn’t last, because—she saw now with horror—his innocent-looking
knight would block her king’s escape. It was terrible. It was the kind of
thing she did to other people. It was the kind of thing Paul Morphy had
done. And she had been thinking about doubled pawns.
She didn’t have to take the queen. What would happen if she didn’t? She
would lose the pawn he had just taken. His queen would sit there in the

---

center of the board. Worse, it could come over to her king rook file and
press down on her castled king. The more she looked, the worse it became.
And it had caught her completely off-guard. She put her elbows on the table
and stared at the position. She needed a counterthreat, a move that would
stop him in his tracks.
There wasn’t any. She spent a half-hour studying the board and found
only that Benny’s move was even sounder than she had thought.
Maybe she could trade her way out of it if he attacked too quickly. She
found a rook move and made it. If he would just bring the queen over now,
there would be a chance to trade.
He didn’t. He developed his other bishop. She brought the rook up to the
second rank. Then he swung the queen over, threatening mate in three. She
had to respond by retreating her knight into the corner. He kept attacking,
and with impotent dismay, she saw a lost game gradually become manifest.
When he took her king bishop pawn with his bishop, sacrificing it, it was
over, and she knew it was over. There was nothing to do. She wanted to
scream, but instead set her king on its side and got up from the table. Her
legs and back were stiff and painful. Her stomach was knotted. All she had
really needed was a draw, and she hadn’t been able to get even that. Benny
had drawn twice already in the tournament. She had gone into the game
with a perfect score, and a draw would have given her the title. But she had
gone for a win.
“Tough game,” Benny was saying. He was holding out his hand. She
forced herself to take it. People were applauding. Not applauding her but
Benny Watts.
By evening she could still feel it, but it had lessened. Mrs. Wheatley tried
to console her. The prize money would be split. She and Benny would be
co-champions, each with a small trophy. “It happens all the time,” Mrs.
Wheatley said. “I have made inquiries, and the Open Championship is often
shared.”
“I didn’t see what he was doing,” Beth said, picturing the move where his
queen took her pawn. It was like putting your tongue against an aching
tooth.
“You can’t finesse everything, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Nobody can.”
Beth looked at her. “You don’t know anything about chess,” she said.
“I know what it feels like to lose.”

---

“I bet you do,” Beth said, as viciously as she could. “I just bet you do.”
Mrs. Wheatley peered at her meditatively for a moment. “And now you
do too,” she said softly.
***
Sometimes on the street that winter in Lexington people would look back
over their shoulders at her. She was on the Morning Show on WLEX. The
interviewer, a woman with heavily lacquered hair and harlequin glasses,
asked Beth if she played bridge; Beth said no. Did she like being the U.S.
Open Champion at chess? Beth said she was co-champion. Beth sat in a
director’s chair with bright lights shining on her face. She was willing to
talk about chess, but the woman’s manner, her false appearance of interest,
made it difficult. Finally she was asked how she felt about the idea that
chess was a waste of time, and she looked at the woman in the other chair
and said, “No more than basketball.” But before she could go on about that,
the show was over. She had been on for six minutes.
The one-page article Townes had written about her appeared in the
Sunday supplement of the Herald-Leader with one of the pictures he had
taken at the window of his room in Las Vegas. She liked herself in the
picture, with her right hand on the white queen and her face looking clear,
serious and intelligent. Mrs. Wheatley bought five copies of the paper for
her scrapbook.
Beth was in high school now, and there was a chess club, but she did not
belong. The boys in it were nonplused to have a Master walking the
hallways, and they would stare at her in a kind of embarrassed awe when
she passed. Once a boy from twelfth grade stopped her to ask nervously if
she would give a simultaneous in Chess Club sometime. She would play
about thirty students at once. She remembered that other high school, near
Methuen, and the way she was stared at afterward. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I
don’t have time.” The boy was unattractive and creepy-looking; it made her
feel unattractive and creepy just to be talking with him.
She spent about an hour a night on her homework and made As. But
homework meant nothing to her. It was the five or six hours of studying
chess that was at the center of her life. She was enrolled as a special student

---

at the university for a class in Russian that met one night a week. It was the
only schoolwork that she paid serious attention to.

---

SEVEN
Beth puffed, inhaled and held the smoke in. There was nothing to it. She
handed the joint to the young man on her right, and he said, “Thank you.”
He had been talking about Donald Duck with Eileen. They were in Eileen
and Barbara’s apartment, a block off Main Street. It was Eileen who had
invited Beth to the party, after the night class.
“It’s got to be Mel Blanc,” Eileen was saying now. “They’re all Mel
Blanc.” Beth was still holding the smoke in, hoping that it would loosen her
up. She had been sitting on the floor with these college students for half an
hour and had said nothing.
“Blanc does Sylvester, but he doesn’t do Donald Duck,” the young man
said with finality. He turned around to face Beth. “I’m Tim,” he said.
“You’re the chess player.”
Beth let the smoke out. “That’s right.”
“You’re the U.S. Women’s Champion.”
“I’m the U.S. Open Co-Champion,” Beth said.
“Sorry. It must be a trip.” He was red-haired and thin. She had seen him
sitting in the middle of the classroom and could remember his soft voice
when they recited Russian phrases in unison.
“Do you play?” Beth did not like the strain in her voice. She felt out of
place. She should either go home or call Mrs. Wheatley.
He shook his head. “Too cerebral. You want a beer?”
She hadn’t had a beer since Las Vegas, a year before. “Okay,” she said.
She started to get up from the floor.
“I’ll get it.” He pushed himself up from where they were sitting on the
carpet. He came back with two cans and handed her one. She took a long
drink. During the first hour the music had been so loud that conversation
was impossible, but when the last record ended no one replaced it. The disk
on the hi-fi against the far wall was still turning, and she could see the little

---

red lights on the amplifier. She hoped no one would notice and play another
record.
Tim eased himself back down next to her with a sigh. “I used to play
Monopoly a lot.”
“I’ve never played that.”
“It makes you a slave of capitalism. I still dream about big bucks.”
Beth laughed. The joint had come back her way, and she held it between
her fingertips and got what she could from it before passing it to Tim. “Why
are you taking Russian,” she said, “if you’re a slave of capitalism?” She
took another swallow of beer.
“You’ve got nice boobs,” he said and took a drag. “We need another
joint,” he announced to the group at large. He turned back to Beth. “I
wanted to read Dostoevsky in the original.”
She finished her beer. Somebody produced another joint and began
sending it around. There were a dozen people in the room. They’d had their
first exam in the evening class, and Beth had been invited to the party
afterward. With the beer and marijuana and talking to Tim, who seemed
very easy to talk to, she felt better. When the joint came up again, she took a
long drag on it, and then another. Someone put on a record. The music
sounded much better, and the loudness didn’t bother her now.
Suddenly she stood up. “I ought to call home,” she said.
“In the bedroom, through the kitchen.”
In the kitchen she opened another beer. She took a long swallow, pushed
open the bedroom door and felt for a light switch. She could not find it. A
box of wooden matches sat on the stove by the frying pan, and she took it
into the bedroom. She still could not find a switch, but on the dresser was a
collection of candles in different shapes. She lit one and shook out the
match. She stared for a moment at the candle. It was a lavender upright wax
penis with a pair of glossy testicles at its base. The wick came from the
glans, and most of the glans had already melted away. Something in her was
shocked.
The telephone was on a table by the unmade bed. She carried the candle
with her, sat on the edge of the bed, and dialed.
Mrs. Wheatley was a bit confused at first; she was dazed from either TV
or beer. “You go on to bed,” Beth said. “I’ve got a key.”

---

“Did you say you were partying with college students?” Mrs. Wheatley
said. “From the university?”
“Yes.”
“Well, be careful what you smoke, honey.”
There was a marvelous feeling across Beth’s shoulders and on the back
of her neck. For a moment she wanted to rush home and embrace Mrs.
Wheatley and hold her tight. But all she said was, “Okay.”
“See you in the morning,” Mrs. Wheatley said.
Beth sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the music from the living
room, and finished her beer. She hardly ever listened to music and had
never been to a school dance. If you didn’t count the Apple Pi’s, this was
the first party she had ever been to. In the living room the song ended. A
moment later, Tim sat on the bed beside her. It seemed perfectly natural,
like the response to a request she had made. “Have another beer,” he said.
She took it and drank. Her movements felt slow and certain. “Jesus!” Tim
whispered in mock alarm. “What’s that purple thing burning there?”
“You tell me,” Beth said.
***
She panicked for a moment as he pushed himself into her. It seemed
frighteningly big, and she felt helpless, as if she were in a dentist’s chair.
But that didn’t last. He was careful, and it didn’t hurt badly. She put her
arms around his back, feeling the roughness of his bulky sweater. He began
moving. He began to squeeze her breasts under her blouse. “Don’t do that,”
she said, and he said, “Whatever you say,” and kept moving in and out. She
could barely feel his penis now, but it was all right. She was seventeen, and
it was about time. He was wearing a condom. The best part had been
watching him put it on, joking about it. What they were doing was really all
right and nothing like books or movies. Fucking. Well, now. If only he were
Townes.
Afterward she fell asleep on the bed. Not in a lovers’ embrace, not even
touching the man she had just made love with, but sprawled out on the bed
with her clothes on. She saw Tim blow out the candle and heard the door
close quietly after him.

---

When she awoke, she saw by the electric alarm clock that it was nearly
ten in the morning. Sunlight came around the edges of the bedroom window
blinds. The air smelled stale. Her legs were prickly from her wool skirt, and
the neck of her sweater had been pressed against her throat, which felt
sweaty. She was ferociously hungry. She sat on the edge of the bed a
minute, blinking. She got up and pushed open the kitchen door. Empty
bottles and beer cans were everywhere. The air was foul with dead smoke.
A note was fastened to the refrigerator door with a magnet in the shape of
Mickey Mouse’s head. It read: “Everybody went to Cincinnati to see a
movie. Stay as long as you like.”
The bathroom was off the living room. When she had finished showering
and had dried herself, she wrapped a towel around her hair, went back to the
kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There were eggs in a carton, two cans
of Budweiser and some pickles. On the door shelf was a Baggie. She picked
it up. Inside was a single, tightly rolled joint. She took it out, put it in her
mouth and lit it with a wooden match. She inhaled deeply. Then she took
out four eggs and put them on to boil. She had never felt so hungry in her
life. She cleaned up the apartment in an organized way, as if she were
playing chess, getting four large grocery bags to put all the bottles and butts
in and stacking these on the back porch. She found a half-full bottle of
Ripple and four unopened beer cans in the debris. She opened a beer and
began vacuuming the living-room carpet.
Hanging over a chair in the bedroom was a pair of jeans. When she had
finished cleaning she changed into them. They fit her perfectly. She found a
white T-shirt in a drawer and put it on. Then she drank the rest of her beer
and opened another. Someone had left a lipstick on the back of the toilet.
She went to the bathroom and studying herself in the mirror, reddened her
lips carefully. She had never worn lipstick before. She was beginning to feel
very good.
***
Mrs. Wheatley’s voice sounded faint and anxious. “You might have called.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“I wouldn’t have minded…”

---

“Anyway, I’m all right. And I’m going to Cincinnati to see a movie. I
won’t be home tonight either.”
There was a silence at the other end of the line.
“I’ll be back after school Monday.”
Finally, Mrs. Wheatley spoke. “Are you with a boy?”
“I was last night.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Wheatley’s voice sounded distant. “Beth…”
Beth laughed. “Come on,” she said. “I’m all right.”
“Well…” She still sounded grave, then her voice became lighter. “I
suppose it’s all right. It’s just that—”
Beth smiled. “I won’t get pregnant,” she said.
At noon she put the rest of the eggs in a pot to boil and turned on the hi-
fi. She had never really listened to music before, but she listened now. She
danced a few steps in the middle of the living room, waiting for the eggs.
She would not let herself get sick. She would eat frequently and drink one
beer—or one glass of wine—every hour. She had made love the night
before, and now it was time to learn about being drunk. She was alone, and
she liked it. It was the way she had learned everything important in her life.
At four in the afternoon she walked into Larry’s Package Store, a block
from the apartment, and bought a fifth of Ripple. When the man was putting
it in the bag, she said, “Do you have a wine like Ripple that’s not so
sweet?”
“These soda-pop wines are all the same,” the man said.
“What about burgundy?” Sometimes Mrs. Wheatley ordered burgundy
with her dinner when they ate out.
“I’ve got Gallo, Italian Swiss Colony, Paul Masson…”
“Paul Masson,” Beth said. “Two bottles.”
That night at eleven she was able to get undressed by being careful. She
had found a pair of pajamas earlier and she managed to get them on and to
pile her clothes on a chair before getting into bed and passing out.
No one had come back by morning. She made scrambled eggs and ate
them with two pieces of toast before having her first glass of wine. It was
another sunny day. In the living room she found Vivaldi’s “The Four
Seasons.” She put it on. Then she began drinking in earnest.
***

---

On Monday morning Beth took a taxi to Henry Clay High School and
arrived ten minutes before her first class. She had left the apartment empty
and clean; the owners had not yet returned from Cincinnati. Most of the
wrinkles had hung out of her sweater and skirt, and she had washed her
argyle socks. She had drunk the second bottle of burgundy Sunday night
and slept soundly for ten hours. Now, in the taxi, there was a dim ache at
the back of her head and her hands trembled slightly, but outside the
window the May morning was exquisite, and the green of the young leaves
on trees was delicate and fresh. By the time she paid and got out she felt
light and springy, ready to go ahead and finish high school and devote her
energy to chess. She had three thousand dollars in her savings account; she
was no longer a virgin; and she knew how to drink.
There was an embarrassed silence when she came home after school.
Mrs. Wheatley, wearing a blue housedress, was mopping the kitchen floor.
Beth settled herself on the sofa and picked up Reuben Fine’s book on the
endgame. It was a book she hated. She had seen a can of Pabst on the side
of the sink, but she did not want any. It would be better not to drink
anything for a long while. She had had enough.
When Mrs. Wheatley finished, she set the mop against the refrigerator
and came into the living room. “I see you’re back,” she began. Her voice
was carefully neutral.
Beth looked at her. “I had a good time,” she said.
Mrs. Wheatley seemed uncertain what attitude to take. Finally she
allowed herself a small smile. It was surprisingly shy, like a girl’s smile.
“Well,” she said, “chess isn’t the only thing in life.”
***
Beth graduated from high school in June, and Mrs. Wheatley gave her a
Bulova watch. The back of the case read “With love from Mother.” She
liked that, but what she liked better was the rating that came in the mail:
2243. At the school party, several other graduates offered Beth surreptitious
drinks, but she refused. She had fruit punch and went home early. She
needed to study; she would be playing her first international tournament, in
Mexico City, in two weeks, and after that came the United States

---

Championship. She had been invited to the Remy-Vallon in Paris, at the end
of the summer. Things were beginning to happen.

---

EIGHT
An hour after the plane crossed the border, Beth was absorbed in pawn-
structure analysis and Mrs. Wheatley was drinking her third bottle of
Cerveza Corona. “Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “I have a confession to
make.”
Beth put the book down, reluctantly.
Mrs. Wheatley seemed nervous. “Do you know what a pen pal is, dear?”
“Someone you trade letters with.”
“Exactly! When I was in high school, our Spanish class was given a list
of boys in Mexico who were studying English. I picked one and sent him a
letter about myself.” Mrs. Wheatley gave a little laugh. “His name was
Manuel. We corresponded for a long time—even while I was married to
Allston. We exchanged photographs.” Mrs. Wheatley opened her purse,
rummaged through it and produced a bent snapshot which she handed to
Beth. It was a picture of a thin-faced man, surprisingly pale-looking, with a
pencil-thin mustache. Mrs. Wheatley hesitated and said, “Manuel will be
meeting us at the airport.”
Beth had no objection to this; it might even be a good thing to have a
Mexican friend. But she was put off by Mrs. Wheatley’s manner. “Have you
met him before?”
“Never.” She leaned over in her seat and squeezed Beth’s forearm. “You
know, I’m really quite thrilled.”
Beth could see that she was a little drunk. “Is that why you wanted to
come down early?”
Mrs. Wheatley pulled back and straightened the sleeves of her blue
cardigan. “I suppose so,” she said.
***
“Si como no?” Mrs. Wheatley said. “And he dresses so well, and opens
doors for me and orders dinner beautifully.” She was pulling up her

---

pantyhose as she talked, tugging fiercely to get them over her broad hips.
They were probably fucking—Mrs. Wheatley and Manuel Córdoba y
Serano. Beth did not let herself visualize it. Mrs. Wheatley had come back
to the hotel at about three that morning, and at two-thirty the night before.
Beth, pretending to be asleep, had smelled the ripe mix of perfume and gin
while Mrs. Wheatley fumbled around the room, undressing and sighing.
“I thought at first it was the altitude,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Seven
thousand three hundred and fifty feet.” Sitting down at the little brass vanity
bench, she leaned forward on one elbow and began rouging her cheeks. “It
makes a person positively giddy. But I think now it’s the culture.” She
stopped and turned to Beth. “There is no hint of a Protestant ethic in
Mexico. They are all Latin Catholics, and they all live in the here and now.”
Mrs. Wheatley had been reading Alan Watts. “I think I’ll have just one
margarita before I go out. Would you call for one, honey?”
Back in Lexington, Mrs. Wheatley’s voice would sometimes have a
distance to it, as though she were speaking from some lonely reach of an
interior childhood. Here in Mexico City the voice was distant but the tone
was theatrically gay, as though Alma Wheatley were savoring an
incommunicable private mirth. It made Beth uneasy. For a moment she
wanted to say something about the expensiveness of room service, even
measured in pesos, but she didn’t. She picked up the phone and dialed six.
The man answered in English. She told him to send a margarita and a large
Coke to 713.
“You could come to the Folklórico,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “I understand
the costumes alone are worth the price of admission.”
“The tournament starts tomorrow. I need to work on endgames.”
Mrs. Wheatley was sitting on the edge of the bed, admiring her feet.
“Beth, honey,” she said dreamily, “perhaps you need to work on yourself.
Chess certainly isn’t all there is.”
“It’s what I know.”
Mrs. Wheatley gave a long sigh. “My experience has taught me that what
you know isn’t always important.”
“What is important?”
“Living and growing,” Mrs. Wheatley said with finality. “Living your
life.”

---

With a sleazy Mexican salesman? Beth wanted to say. But she kept silent.
She did not like the jealousy she felt.
“Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley went on in a voice rich with plausibility. “You
haven’t visited Bellas Artes or even Chapultepec Park. The zoo there is
delightful. You’ve taken your meals in this room and spent your time with
your nose in chess books. Shouldn’t you just relax on the day before the
tournament and think about something other than chess?”
Beth wanted to hit her. If she had gone to those places, she would have
had to go with Manuel and listen to his endless stories. He was forever
touching Mrs. Wheatley’s shoulder or her back, standing too close to her,
smiling too eagerly. “Mother,” she said, “tomorrow at ten I play the black
pieces against Octavio Marenco, the champion of Brazil. That means he has
the first move. He is thirty-four years old and an International Grandmaster.
If I lose, we will be paying for this trip—this adventure—out of capital. If I
win, I will be playing someone in the afternoon who is even better than
Marenco. I need to work on my endgames.”
“Honey, you are what is called an ‘intuitive’ player, aren’t you?” Mrs.
Wheatley had never discussed chess playing with her before.
“I’ve been called that. Moves come to me sometimes.”
“I’ve noticed the moves they applaud the loudest are the ones you make
quickly. And there’s a certain look on your face.”
Beth was startled. “I suppose you’re right,” she said.
“Intuition doesn’t come from books. I think it’s because you don’t like
Manuel.”
“Manuel’s all right,” Beth said, “but he doesn’t come by to see me.”
“That’s irrelevant,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “You need to relax. There’s not
another player in the world as gifted as you are. I haven’t the remotest idea
what faculties a person uses in order to play chess well, but I am convinced
that relaxation can only improve them.”
Beth said nothing. She had been furious for several days. She did not like
Mexico City or this enormous concrete hotel with its cracked tiles and leaky
faucets. She did not like the food in the hotel, but she did not want to eat
alone in restaurants. Mrs. Wheatley had gone out for lunch and dinner every
day with Manuel, who owned a green Dodge and seemed to be always at
her disposal.

---

“Why don’t you have lunch with us?” Mrs. Wheatley said. “We can drop
you off afterward and you can study then.”
Beth started to answer, when there was a knock at the door. It was room
service with Mrs. Wheatley’s margarita. Beth signed for it while Mrs.
Wheatley took a few thoughtful sips and stared out the window at the
sunlight. “I really haven’t been well lately,” Mrs. Wheatley said, squinting.
Beth looked at her coolly. Mrs. Wheatley was pale and clearly
overweight. She held the glass by the stem in one hand while her other hand
fluttered at her thick waist. There was something deeply pathetic about her,
and Beth’s heart softened. “I don’t want lunch,” Beth said, “but you can
drop me off at the zoo. I’ll take a cab back.”
Mrs. Wheatley hardly seemed to hear, but after a moment she turned to
Beth, still holding the glass in the same way, and smiled vaguely. “That’ll
be nice, dear,” she said.
***
Beth spent a long time looking at the Galapagos turtles—big, lumbering
creatures in permanent slow motion. One of the keepers had dumped a
bushel of wet-looking lettuce and overripe tomatoes into their pen and the
five of them pushed through the pile as a group, munching and trampling,
their feet like the dusty feet of elephants and their stupid innocent faces
intent on something beyond vision or food.
While she was standing by the fence a vendor came by with a cart of iced
beer and, hardly thinking, she said, “Cerveza Corona, por favor,” and held
out a five-peso note. The man flipped off the bottle top and poured the drink
into a paper cup with an Aztec Eagle logo. “Muchisimas gracias,” she said.
It was her first beer since high school; in the hot Mexican sun, it tasted
wonderful. She drank it quickly. A few minutes later she saw another
vendor standing by a circle of red flowers; she bought another beer. She
knew she should not be doing this; the tournament started tomorrow. She
did not need liquor. Nor tranquilizers. She had not had a green pill for
several months now. But she drank the beer. It was three in the afternoon,
and the sun was ferocious. The zoo was full of women, most of them in
dark rebozos, with small dark-eyed children. What few men there were
gave Beth significant looks, but she ignored them, and none of them tried to

---

speak to her. Despite the Mexican reputation for gaiety and abandon, it was
a quiet place, and the crowd seemed more like the crowd at a museum.
There were flowers everywhere.
She finished her beer, bought another and continued walking. She was
beginning to feel high. She passed more trees, more flowers, cages with
sleeping chimpanzees. Around a corner she came face to face with a family
of gorillas. Inside the cage the huge male and the baby were asleep head to
head with their black bodies pressed against the bars in front. In the middle
of the cage the female leaned philosophically against an enormous truck
tire, scowling and biting a fingertip. Standing on the asphalt outside the
cage was a human family, also a mother, father and child, watching the
gorillas attentively. They were not Mexicans. It was the man who caught
Beth’s attention. She recognized his face.
He was a short, heavy man, not unlike a gorilla himself, with jutting
brow ridges, bushy eyebrows, coarse black hair and an impassive look.
Beth stiffened, holding her paper cup of beer. She felt her cheeks flushing.
The man was Vasily Borgov, Chess Champion of the World. There was no
mistaking the grim Russian face, the authoritarian scowl. She had seen it on
the cover of Chess Review several times, once with the same black suit and
splashy green-and-gold tie.
Beth stared for a full minute. She had not known Borgov would be at this
tournament. She had already received her board assignment by mail: it was
Board Nine. Borgov would be Board One. She felt a sudden chill at the
back of her neck and looked down at the beer in her hand. She raised it to
her mouth and finished it, resolving it would be her last until after the
tournament. Looking at the Russian again, she panicked; would he
recognize her? He must not see her drinking. He was looking into the cage
as though waiting for the gorilla to move a pawn. The gorilla was clearly
lost in her own thoughts, ignoring everyone. Beth envied her.
Beth had no more beer that day and went to bed early, but she was
awakened by Mrs. Wheatley’s arrival, sometime in the middle of the night.
Mrs. Wheatley coughed a good deal while she was undressing in the
darkened room. “Go ahead and turn the light on,” Beth said. “I’m awake.”
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Wheatley gasped between coughs. “I seem to have a
virus.” She turned the bathroom light on and partially closed the door. Beth
looked at the little Japanese clock on the nightstand. It was ten after four.

---

The sounds she made undressing—the rustling and partly suppressed
coughing—were infuriating. Beth’s first chess game would begin in six
hours. She lay in bed furious and tense, waiting for Mrs. Wheatley to be
quiet.
***
Marenco was a somber little dark-skinned man in a dazzling canary-colored
shirt. He spoke almost no English and Beth no Portuguese; they began
playing without preliminary conversation. Beth did not feel like talking,
anyway. Her eyes were scratchy, and her body was uncomfortable all over.
She had felt generally unpleasant from the time their plane landed in
Mexico, as though she were on the verge of developing an illness that she
never quite got, and she had not gone back to sleep the night before. Mrs.
Wheatley had coughed in her sleep and muttered and rasped, while Beth
tried to force herself to relax, to ignore the distractions. She did not have
any green pills with her. There were three left, but they were in Kentucky.
She lay on her back with her arms straight at her sides as she had as an
eight-year-old trying to sleep by the hallway door at Methuen. Now, sitting
on a straight wooden chair in front of a long tableful of chessboards in the
ballroom of a Mexican hotel, she felt irritated and a bit dizzy. Marenco had
just opened with pawn to king four. Her clock was ticking. She shrugged
and played pawn to queen’s bishop four, trusting the formal maneuvers of
the Sicilian to keep her steady until she got into the game. Marenco brought
the king’s knight out with civil orthodoxy. She pushed the queen pawn to
the fourth rank; he exchanged pawns. She began to relax as her mind
moved away from her body and onto the tableau of forces in front of her.
By eleven-thirty she had him down by two pawns, and just after noon he
resigned. They had got nowhere close to an endgame; when Marenco stood
up and offered her his hand, the board was still massed with uncaptured
pieces.
The top three boards were in a separate room across the hallway from the
main ballroom. Beth had glanced at it that morning while rushing, five
minutes late, to the place where she was to play, but she had not stopped to
look in. She walked toward it now, across the carpeted room with its rows
of players bent over boards—players from the Philippines and West

---

Germany and Iceland and Norway and Chile, most of them young, almost
all of them male. There were two other women: a Mexican official’s niece,
at Board Twenty-two, and an intense young housewife from Buenos Aires;
she was at Board Seventeen. Beth did not stop to look at any of the
positions.
Several people were standing in the hallway outside the smaller game
room. She pushed past them into the doorway, and there across the room
from her at Board One, wearing the same dark suit, the same grim scowl,
was Vasily Borgov, his expressionless eyes on the game in front of him. A
respectfully silent crowd stood between her and him, but the players sat on
a kind of wooden stage a few feet above floor level, and she could see him
clearly. Behind him on the wall was a display chessboard with cardboard
pieces; a Mexican was just moving one of the white knights into its new
position as Beth came in. She studied the board for a moment. Everything
was very tight, but Borgov seemed to have an edge.
She looked at Borgov and quickly looked away. His face was alarming in
its concentration. She turned and left, walking slowly along the hall.
Mrs. Wheatley was in bed but awake. She blinked at Beth from the bed,
pulling the covers up to her chin. “Hi, sweetie.”
“I thought we could have lunch,” Beth said. “I don’t play again until
tomorrow.”
“Lunch,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Oh my.” And then; “How did you do?”
“He resigned after thirty moves.”
“You’re a wonder,” Mrs. Wheatley said. She pushed herself carefully up
in bed until she was sitting. “I’m feeling wonky, but I probably need
something in my stomach. Manuel and I had cabrito for dinner. It may yet
be the end of me.” She looked very pale. She got out of bed slowly and
walked to the bathroom. “I suppose I could have a sandwich, or one of
those less inflamed tacos.”
***
The competition at the tournament was more consistent, vigorous and
professional than anything Beth had seen before, yet its effect on her, once
she had got through the first game after a near-sleepless night, was not
disturbing. It was a smoothly run affair, with all announcements made in

---

both Spanish and English. Everything was hushed. In her game the next day
she played the Queen’s Gambit Declined against an Austrian named
Diedrich, a pale, esthetic young man in a sleeveless sweater, and she forced
him to resign in midgame with a relentless pressure in the center of the
board. She did it mostly with pawns and was herself quietly amazed at the
intricacies that seemed to flow from her fingertips as she took the center of
the board and began to crush his position as one might crush an egg. He had
played well, made no blunders or anything that could properly be called a
mistake, but Beth moved with such deadly accuracy, such measured control,
that his position was hopeless by the twenty-third move.
***
Mrs. Wheatley had invited her to have dinner with her and Manuel; Beth
had refused. Although you didn’t eat dinner in Mexico until ten o’clock, she
did not expect to find Mrs. Wheatley in the room when she came back from
shopping at seven.
She was dressed but in bed with her head propped up against a pillow. A
half-finished drink sat on the nightstand beside her. Mrs. Wheatley was in
her mid-forties, but the paleness of her face and the lines of worry in her
forehead made her look much older. “Hello, dear,” she said in a faint voice.
“Are you sick?”
“A bit under the weather.”
“I could get a doctor.”
The word “doctor” seemed to hang in the air between them until Mrs.
Wheatley said, “It’s not that bad. I just need rest.”
Beth nodded and went into the bathroom to wash up. Mrs. Wheatley’s
appearance and behavior were disturbing. But when Beth came back into
the room, she was out of bed and looking lively enough, smoothing the
covers. She smiled wryly. “Manuel won’t be coming.”
Beth looked inquiringly at her.
“He had business in Oaxaca.”
Beth hesitated for a moment. “How long will he be away?”
Mrs. Wheatley sighed. “At least until we leave.”
“I’m sorry.”

---

“Well,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “I’ve never been to Oaxaca, but I suspect it
resembles Denver.”
Beth stared at her a moment and then laughed. “We can have dinner
together,” she said. “You can take me to one of the places you know about.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Wheatley said. She smiled ruefully. “It was fun while
it lasted. He really had a pleasant sense of humor.”
“That’s good,” Beth said. “Mr. Wheatley didn’t seem very amusing.”
“My God,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “Allston never thought anything was
funny, except maybe Eleanor Roosevelt.”
***
In this tournament each player played one game a day. It would go on for
six days. Beth’s first two games were simple enough for her, but the third
came as a shock.
She arrived five minutes early and was at the board when her opponent
came walking up, a bit awkwardly. He looked about twelve years old. Beth
had seen him around the ballroom, had passed boards where he was
playing, but she had been distracted, and his youth hadn’t really registered.
He had curly black hair and wore an old-fashioned white sport shirt, so
neatly ironed that its creases stood out from his thin arms. It was very
strange, and she felt uncomfortable. She was supposed to be the prodigy. He
looked so damned serious.
She held out her hand. “I’m Beth Harmon.”
He stood, bowed slightly, took her hand firmly and shook it once. “I am
Georgi Petrovitch Girev,” he said. Then he smiled shyly, a small furtive
smile. “I am honored.”
She felt flustered. “Thanks.” They both sat, and he pressed the button
down on her clock. She played pawn to queen four, glad to have the first
move against this unnerving child.
It started out as a routine Queen’s Gambit Accepted; he took the offered
bishop pawn, and they both developed toward the center. But as they got
into the midgame it became more complex than usual, and she realized that
he was playing a very sophisticated defense. He moved fast—maddeningly
fast—and he seemed to know exactly what he was going to do. She tried a
few threats, but he was unperturbed by them. An hour passed, then another.

---

The move numbers were now in the thirties, and the board was dense with
men. She looked at him as he was moving a piece—at the skinny little arm
stuck out from the absurd shirt—and she hated him. He could have been a
machine. You little creep, she thought, suddenly realizing that the adults she
had played as a child must have thought the same thing about her.
It was afternoon now, and most of the games were finished. They were
on move thirty-four. She wanted to get this over with and get back to Mrs.
Wheatley. She was worried about Mrs. Wheatley. She felt old and weary
playing this tireless child with his bright dark eyes and quick little
movements; she knew that if she made even a small blunder, he would be at
her throat. She looked at her clock. Twenty-five minutes left. She would
have to speed up and get forty moves in before her flag dropped. If she
didn’t watch it, he would have her in serious time pressure. That was
something she was in the habit of putting other people in; it made her
uneasy. She had never been behind on the clock before.
For the last several moves she had been considering a series of trades in
the center—knight and bishop for knight and bishop, and a rook exchange a
few moves later. It would simplify a good deal, but the problem was that it
made for an endgame and she tried to avoid endgames. Now, seeing that she
was forty-five minutes behind him on the clock, she felt uncomfortable. She
would have to get rid of this logjam. She picked up her knight and took his
king’s bishop with it. He responded immediately, not even looking up at
her. He took her queen’s bishop. They continued with the moves as though
they had been predetermined, and when it was over, the board was full of
empty spaces. Each player had a rook, a knight, four pawns and the king.
She brought her king out from the back rank, and so did he. At this stage
the king’s power as an attacker became abruptly manifest; it was no longer
necessary to hide it. The question now was one of getting a pawn to the
eighth rank and promoting it. They were in the endgame.
She drew in her breath, shook her head to clear it and began to
concentrate on the position. The important thing was to have a plan.
“We should perhaps adjourn now.” It was Girev’s voice, almost a
whisper. She looked at his face, pale and serious, and then looked back at
the clock. Both flags had fallen. That had never happened to her before. She
was startled and sat stupidly in her chair for a moment. “You must seal the

---

move,” Girev said. Suddenly he looked uncomfortable and held up his hand
for the tournament director.
One of the directors came over, walking softly. It was a middle-aged man
with thick glasses. “Miss Harmon must seal her move,” Girev said.
The director looked at the clock. “I’ll get an envelope.”
She looked at the board again. It seemed clear enough. She should
advance the rook pawn that she had decided on already, putting it on the
fourth rank. The director handed her an envelope and stepped discreetly
back a few steps. Girev rose and turned away politely. Beth wrote “P-QR4”
on her score sheet, folded it, put it in the envelope and handed it to the
tournament director.
She stood up stiffly and looked around her. There were no more games in
progress, although a few players were still there, some seated and some
standing, looking over positions on the boards. A few were huddled over
boards, analyzing games that had ended.
Girev had come back to the table. His face was very serious. “May I ask
something?” he said.
“Yes.”
“In America,” he said, “I am told that one sees films in cars. Is this true?”
“Drive-ins?” she said. “You mean drive-in movies?”
“Yes. Elvis Presley movies that you watch from inside a car. Debbie
Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor. That happens?”
“It sure does.”
He looked at her, and suddenly his earnest face broke into a broad smile.
“I would dig that,” he said. “I would certainly dig that.”
***
Mrs. Wheatley slept soundly through the night and was still sleeping when
Beth got up. Beth felt refreshed and alert; she had gone to sleep worried
about the adjourned game with Girev, but she felt all right about it in the
morning. The pawn move had been strong enough. She walked barefoot
from the sofa where she had been sleeping to the bed where Mrs. Wheatley
lay and felt her forehead. It was cool. Beth kissed her lightly on the cheek
and went into the bathroom and showered. When she left for breakfast, Mrs.
Wheatley was still asleep.

---

Her morning game was with a Mexican in his early twenties. Beth had
the black pieces, played the Sicilian and caught him off-guard on the
nineteenth move. Then she began wearing him down. Her head was very
clear, and she was able to keep him so busy trying to answer her threats that
she was able eventually to pick off a bishop in exchange for two pawns and
drive his king into an exposed position with a knight check. When she
brought her queen out, the Mexican stood up, smiled at her coldly and said,
“Enough. Enough.” He shook his head angrily. “I resign the game.”
For a moment she was furious, wanting to finish, to drive his king across
the board and checkmate it. “You play a game that is… awesome,” the
Mexican said. “You make a man feel helpless.” He bowed slightly, turned
and left the table.
***
Playing out the Girev game that afternoon, she found herself moving with
astonishing speed and force. Girev was wearing a light-blue shirt this time,
and it stuck out from his elbows like the edges of a child’s kite. She sat at
the board impatiently while the tournament director opened the envelope
and made the pawn move she had sealed the day before. She got up and
paced across the nearly empty ballroom where two other adjournments
were being played out, waiting for Girev to move. She looked back across
the room toward him several times and saw him hunched over the board,
his little fists jammed into his pale cheeks, the blue shirt seeming to glow
under the lights. She hated him—hated his seriousness and hated his youth.
She wanted to crush him.
She could hear the click of the clock button from halfway across the
room and made a beeline back to the table. She did not take her seat but
stood looking at the position. He had put his rook on the queen bishop file,
as she had thought he might. She was ready for that and pushed her pawn
again, turned and walked back across the room. There was a table there
with a water pitcher and a few paper cups. She poured herself a cup,
surprised to see that her hand trembled as she did so. By the time she got
back to the board, Girev had moved again. She moved immediately, not
bringing the rook to defend but abandoning the pawn and instead advancing
her king. She picked the piece up lightly with her fingertips the way she had

---

seen that piratical-looking man in Cincinnati do years before and dropped it
on the queen four square, turned and walked away again.
She kept it up that way, not sitting down at all. Within three quarters of
an hour she had him. It was really simple—almost too easy. It was only a
matter of trading rooks at the right time. The trade pulled his king back a
square on the recapture, just enough to let her pawn get by and queen. But
Girev did not wait for that; he resigned immediately after the rook check
and the trade which followed. He stepped toward her as if to say something,
but seeing her face, stopped. For a moment she softened, remembering the
child she had been only a few years before and how it devastated her to lose
a chess game.
She held out her hand, and when he shook it she forced a smile and said,
“I’ve never been to a drive-in either.”
He shook his head. “I should not have let you do that. With the rook.”
“Yes,” she said. And then: “How old were you when you started playing
chess?”
“Four. I was district champion at seven. I hope to be World Champion
one day.”
“When?”
“In three years.”
“You’ll be sixteen in three years.”
He nodded grimly.
“If you win, what will you do afterward?”
He looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“If you’re World Champion at sixteen, what will you do with the rest of
your life?”
He still looked puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said.
***
Mrs. Wheatley went to bed early and seemed better the next morning. She
was up before Beth, and when they went downstairs together for breakfast
in the Cámara de Toreros, Mrs. Wheatley ordered a Spanish omelet and two
cups of coffee and finished it all. Beth felt relieved.
***

---

On the bulletin board near the registration desk was a list of players; Beth
had not looked at it for several days. Coming into the room now ten minutes
before game time, she stopped and checked the scores. They were listed in
order of their international ratings, and Borgov was at the top with 2715.
Harmon was seventeenth with 2370. After each player’s name was a series
of boxes showing his score for the rounds. “0” meant a loss, “½” a draw,
and “1” a win. There were a great many “½s.” Three names had an
uninterrupted string of “l’s” after them; Borgov and Harmon were two of
these.
The pairings were a few feet to the right. At the top of the list was
BORGOV-RAND
, and below that 
HARMON—SOLOMON
. If she and Borgov both
won today, they would not necessarily play each other in the final game
tomorrow. She was not sure whether she wanted to play him or not. Playing
Girev had rattled her. She felt a dim unsureness about Mrs. Wheatley,
despite her apparent resurgence; the image of her white skin, rouged cheeks
and forced smiles made Beth uneasy. A buzz of voices had begun in the
room as players found their boards, set up their clocks, settled into
preparations for play. Beth shook off her unease as well as she could and
found Board Four—the first board in the big room—and waited for
Solomon.
Solomon was by no means easy, and the game lasted four hours before he
was forced to resign. Yet at no point during all of that time did she ever lose
her edge—the tiny advantage that the opening move gives to the player of
the white pieces. Solomon did not say anything, but she could tell from the
way he stalked off afterward that he was furious to be beaten by a woman.
She had seen it often enough before to recognize it. Usually it made her
angry, but it didn’t matter right now. She had something else on her mind.
When he had gone she went to look in the smaller room where Borgov
played, but it was empty. The winning position—Borgov’s—was still
displayed on the big board on the wall; it was as devastating as Beth’s win
over Solomon had been.
In the ballroom she looked at the bulletin board. Some of tomorrow’s
pairings were already up. That was a surprise. She stepped closer to look,
and her heart caught in her throat; at the top of the finals list in black

---

printed letters was 
BORGOV—HARMON
. She blinked and read it again, holding
her breath.
Beth had brought three books with her to Mexico City. She and Mrs.
Wheatley ate dinner in their room, and afterward Beth took out